Today in the podcast I talk about the 7 reasons people with “LIKE” the Facebook movie. Get it? Like??? Luckily, the rest of the podcast is not that cheesy. Here is the outline of topics I cover:

1) A built-in audience of 500 million fans
With just the sheer number of people ON Facebook, how can this thing NOT make money? It was announced July 21 that Facebook had officially passed Five Hundred Million worldwide users.

– Let’s see… how could they market this… um, how about with Facebook ads?
– College kids are going to see this… they came of age during the Facebook era and lived it.
– Social media geeks are going to see this… it’s like Sex and the City for nerds
– Other non-geeks that don’t know the full story will see it
– Millions will see it just out of curiosity

2) Social media/word of mouth/bloggers
What’s the best way to get lots of people to see your movie?Word of mouth marketing.
And no site on the web is better equipped to spread the word than Facebook.

We are consumed with it.
– 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
– 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
– The average user has 130 friends

If even a small fraction of the first people to see it shares it with their 130 friends, the word of mouth viral marketing will be like the Old Spice guy on crack.

BUT

Word of mouth only works if it’s a GOOD movie. Bad word of mouth spreads too. So, do we have any indicators to see if it will actually be a GOOD movie? Well, we can start by looking at the pedigrees of the creators:

3) Aaron Sorkin, writer
– He did the West Wing, a show that I’ve heard was amazing, but I never really watched. But 7 years on the air and dozens of awards can’t be bad.
– He also did A Few Good Men, a film that grossed $141,000,000 in the US alone. Did the film do well because Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Jack Nicholson were in it? Or did those stars take the role because it was a strong script?
– He also did Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. This was a show that not a lot of people saw (it was canceled after one season due to ratings), but I actually watched every episode and loved it. The dialog was excellent.

4) David Fincher, director
– He did the movie Se7en, not a bad flick
– He also did Fight Club, which the “reddit.com movie critic” subreddit section thinks is one of the best all time
– He was a Best Director nominee for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. While I thought this movie was very good (but not great… and WAY too freaking long), it grossed $127MM domestic.

6) Justin Timberlake with a permJust seeing him with that hair is comedy enough. But consider his fan base as well:
– 55 million albums sold with N’Sync
– 9 million albums sold as a solo artist
– Hugely popular guest on Saturday Night Live (I can definitely see him hosting to plug the movie)
– A crossover star in fashion… now doing commercials
– Hugely wide appeal (Notice everyone blames Janet Jackson and never him for the Super Bowl incident)

[Honorable mention for Trent Reznor, who I forgot to mention in the podcast. He is doing the musical score for the entire movie, and has a huge base both as a solo artist and from Nine Inch Nails]

7) Haters
This movie will have a ton of buzz just because it will become cool to NOT like the movie. People will want to hate it, because we’re already starting to see evidence of Facebook overload.

– It’s going to be similar to Apple. Do some people hate Apple? Yes. Do they call the supporters Fanboys? Yes. Does it stop millions of people from lining up days in advance to buying every product? No.

– Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder of Facebook had the following to say about The Social Network (I paraphrased a bit)

“It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn’t matter and leaves out things that really did. Other than that, it’s just cool to see a dramatization of history. A lot of exciting things happened in 2004, but mostly we just worked a lot and stressed out about things, so I’m just going to choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds.”

– The anti-movie spoofs have begun:

So to sum up, not everyone is going to be “a fan” of the movie, but I think enough people will “like” it for it to crack $125MM with ease.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 4:26 am and is filed under Facebook, Pop Culture / Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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